Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/669

Rh of child. Yet there seems to me little doubt that these are common and among the most pronounced characters of the first years.

Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. If the order of development of the child follows and summarizes that of the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least of the passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the savage before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilized man. That he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage and to the brute suggests how little ages of civilized life, with its suppression of these furious impulses, have done to tone down the ancient and carefully transmitted instincts. The child at birth and for a long while after may then be said to be the representative of wild, untamed Nature, which it is for education to subdue and fashion into something softer and gentler.

At the same time the child is more than this. In this first clash of his will with another's he knows more than the brute's sensual fury. He suffers consciously, he realizes himself in his antagonism to a world outside him. It is probable, as I have pointed out before, that even a physical check bringing pain, as when the child runs his head against a wall, may develop this consciousness of self in its antagonism to a not-self. This consciousness reaches a higher phase when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as another will. Self-feeling, a germ of the feeling of "my worth," enters into this early passionateness and differentiates it from a mere animal rage. The absolute prostration of infantile anger seems to be the expression of this keen consciousness of the self of its rebuff and injury.

While, then, these outbursts of savage instinct in children are, no doubt, ugly and in their direction contra-moral, they must not hastily be pronounced wholly bad and wicked. To call them wicked in the full sense of that term is indeed to forget that they are the swift reactions of instinct which have in them nothing of reflection or of deliberation. The angry child venting his spite in some wild act of violence is a long, long way from a man who knowingly and with the consent of his will retaliates and hates. The very fleeting character of the outbreak, the rapid subsidence of passion, and transition to another mood show that there is here no real malice prepense. These instincts will, no doubt, if they are not tamed, develop later into truly wicked dispositions; yet it is by no means a small matter to recognize that they do not amount to full moral depravity.

On the other hand, we have seen that we do not render complete justice to these early manifestations of angry passion if we class them with those of the brute. The child in these first years, though not yet human in the sense of having rational insight into his wrongdoing, is human in the sense of suffering through